Fort Lauderdale

Issue: The Fop Wants To Run The Naacp.

Marsha Ellison must have hit a nerve. Why else would the Fort Lauderdale Fraternal Order of Police suddenly want its members to join the NAACP?

As president of the Fort Lauderdale branch of the NAACP, Ellison is probing complaints about police harassment and intimidation, and the president of the local FOP wants her to stop it.

The NAACP apparently went too far last year when they urged Fort Lauderdale police officials to fire an officer accused of threatening a black youth and then lying about it. The officer wasn't fired but the department did suspend him for a month without pay. The incident added to the long held perception in the black community that the police are more interested in controlling black residents than serving and protecting them from crime.

More recently, the local civil rights organization held hearings to investigate complaints of intimidation, harassment and racial profiling lodged against several law enforcement agencies in Broward County, including the Fort Lauderdale police.

That apparently was too much for Joe Lokeinsky, president of the Fort Lauderdale FOP. He urged his members to join the NAACP in order to vote Ellison out of office. "The FOP is tired of the current position of the president of the Broward branch of the NAACP," he wrote recently in a union flier.

There are far better ways for the police union to curb any lingering "us vs. them" sentiment in the black community than interfering in the politics of a local civil rights organization. They could start by working more closely with black residents to deter crime, which would prove more productive than Lokeinsky's half-baked, counterproductive takeover scheme.

If the FOP truly wants better relations with the black community, it had better stand down and get back to the business of authentic police work.

BOTTOM LINE: The only police action worth the FOP's time is fighting crime.